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Nobody Here But Us Capitalists:
Democracy, Big Business, and Progress at the turn of the
20th century
Overview:
In California, high school juniors are to focus their study
of U.S. history in the 20th century. In order to better
do this, it can be productive to devote some time to the
development of the social ills in the last half of the 19th
century that were of concern to the Progressives. Studying
what plagued society, what solutions the Progressives offered,
and which of those solutions were adopted can help students
be better prepared to study the New Deal and the Great Society
later in the year.
While students usually have no trouble understanding how
the lack of sewers, high crime rates, and insufficient housing
can be problems, my students have had difficulty understanding
the "problem" with monopolies or the accumulations
of fabulous wealth. This has meant that the students often
did not understand the concerns for democracy that the Progressives
felt in the face of the growth of monopolies such as Standard
Oil and Carnegie Steel. I developed this lesson in order
to have the students begin to understand how we have combined
capitalism and democracy in this country, as we still live
with the particular configuration created during the Progressive
Era. Ultimately I encourage the students to contemplate
whether a democratic society can function successfully when
there are extremes of rich and poor.
I have done this lesson with both an AP and an honors
class. The daily schedule and activities were the same for
both. For the AP class, however, I used sources that tended
to be three to six pages long, instead of the one-page sources
I refer to below for the AP Class. I used Henry George on
Progress and Poverty, Andrew Carnegie on Wealth,
William Graham Sumner on The Absurd Effort to Make the
World Over, Henry Demarest Lloyd on Wealth Against
Commonwealth, Samuel Gompers' Letter on Labor in
Industrial Society, Lincoln Steffens on The Shame
of the Cities, Ida M. Tarbell on the methods of the
Standard Oil Company, and Jane Addams on Twenty Years
at Hull-House. These can all be found in the source
books and at the web sites listed in the Resources
section. The students in the AP class had also done
more extensive background reading, especially on the debate
among historians on whether to call men such as Andrew Carnegie
a "robber baron" or an "industrial statesman"
and on the origin of and importance of the Populists. Other
than these differences, the lesson was conducted same as
described.
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